Renders much slower in Render sequence than in Arnold preview

[drbrandtjr]

Hi,  I'm working in Maya 2018.

I'm finding that rendering in Render Sequence in much slower than renders in the Arnold preview window.  Sometimes dramatically.  With the same settings.  For example, I have a little surface shaded element in the middle of the screen.  I the preview it renders instantly, which is what I would expect. In the Render Sequence it seems to want to chug along and draw every black square at a leisurely pace.  This is ridiculous, that's 60 times as long!  Other full frames are taking about 75 to 100% longer.

Help!

thanks...

[tony.su]

There are lots of process. One of them is reading data. The time of reading data is not very important and it's instability. So if you want to test render speed, you need a large scene. I guess the different between them will be very small when you render large scene.

[Stephen.Blair]

IPR (Arnold Render View) does a progressive render: first at AA = -3, the AA = -2 and so on up to the actual AA setting.

A sequence render isn't going to do that progressive series of renders.

[drbrandtjr]

Thanks you guys for responding, but it still doesn't make sense or help me.

Tony,   All the data is already loaded in the interface, Right? Are you saying that Render Sequence reloads all the data each frame?  

Stephane,  If progressive rendering is so much faster, why doesn't Render Sequence (or Batch Render) use progressive?   

And BTW,  Batch render is about 5 times as fast as Render Sequence.  Why is this?

Thanks!  🙂

[Stephen.Blair]

AA = -3 is something like 1 sample per 8 pixels, so it's blocky but fast to show

So something shows up fast, and then it is progressively improved as IPR renders with higher and higher AA levels.

It's rendering the same frame multiple times, something you would never do for rendering a final frame.

Render Sequence is rendering inside Maya, while batch rendering is a separate process, outside of Maya.

I would compare render logs from each type of render.

[tony.su]

You can find all information in render log. 

https://docs.arnoldrenderer.com/display/AFMUG/Diagnostics

Don't forget set Verbosity Level.

Check how long each processes will take. And as Stephane said you should check if the render quality is same. I guess it's not.

[Anonymous]

This is useful information 🙂 but I'm not convinced that progressive renders are the reason that renders in the Arnold render view appear faster than rendering in a render sequence.

I have been noticing the same issue as @drbrandtjr, but in my Arnold render view settings, I have kept the Progressive Refinement setting off and let one frame fully render so that at the end it will tell me the total time that the frame took to render. (As an example, I rendered a frame that took 12 minutes.) But when I start a render sequence, that same frame took 40 minutes. In both scenarios the buckets looked the same – the image was black until a square of the picture was fully rendered. Originally I expected my animation to take 20 hours, and instead it took about 3 days (running over night as well).

It would be great to get to the bottom of this issue so that my renders can hopefully take only as long as my initial calculations suggested. Any help is appreciated!

[cavescholar]

Here is Arnold Documentation on Renderview windows and a bunch of goodies, no login required. I was thinking it could have to do with if you have more than one renderable camera in sequences. Setting up AOV's can help with rendering and is a topic of it's own. 

It is hard to tell without specifics like what type of settings you are using in Render Settings, what size of textures (512, 2K, 4K, etc.)

In the 'Render Settings' window, there is a diagnosis tab. You can have the render write diagnosis to disk and analyze it. Also this tab lets you disable things to try to isolate what is causing the issue ( Textures, shaders, Subdivisions, etc.).

Rendering complex scenes is not for a home gaming computer in my experience, that is left to render farms. 

Good luck, rendering is fun, but the better the image, the longer the wait. 😐

[drbrandtjr]

Hi @dcdouch1,

I think the real reason is Autodesk want us to buy render licenses to batch render with Arnold.  This is annoying, and not worth it.  What can we do with just one render license?  It's a waste of money.  Since I originally posted this issue I've been rendering on external render farms.  This works great when there is a budget, and/or a sizable project to render.  It would be nice to be able to render small stuff, here and there, with Render sequence or Batch render like we used to be able to, but Autodesk doesn't think so.

David

[mspeer]

Hi!

@drbrandtjr  and @Anonymous .

This is for sure not the normal behavior.

I never had any difference for render time between Arnold Render View, Maya Render View and Batch Render and I do a lot of test renders here. I did a quick test to confirm this.

For further troubleshooting I highly recommend to provide example scenes (at best scenes that don't require textures) with the information how long the rendering takes for you + matching Arnold log files ("Info" or "Debug") for rendering in Arnold Render View, Maya Render View, Batch Render.

By this your settings and renderer behavior can be checked, also the same scene can be rendered on an other computer for comparison.

[bhoyle]

I have the same problems.
In Arnold Renderview the frame renders in 18 seconds with GPU.
When I start the Batch Render (also GPU) each frame takes 60+ seconds.
OptixDenoiser + LensEffects activated - of course I did not alter the render settings before starting the batch renderer.

Too be honest I am giving up on Arnold - a year ago initally I loved the GPU rendertimes for still images but since I started to render out animations, Arnold is a pure pain in the ass. Most of the time GPU batch/sequence rendering didn´t work at all. It just stops rendering after several frames and says "Rendering Completed". In the beginning this often happened after only 2-3 frames. Then came an update and at least it rendered ~ 20 frames in one batch before it quit. So i had to manually restart batch rendering after every 20 frames. (talking about workflows!)

This was a year ago. I just updated MtoA and my NVIDIA Drivers and now GPU Batch often doesn´t render a single image OR when it finally does, is much slower compared to the Arnold Renderview. The only improvement I noticed: material swatches now work. (haha)

The batch rendering experience with GPU is a mess. I cannot imagine using this for client work...for me it´s just a hobby these days but Arnold pushes me to look at Blender. (after 20 years of using Maya!)

[wzwow]

i am using single user lic... and realize anorld lic is actually a trial... and now using cmd line rendering no long work OMG!